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Adagio said:What justifies a's knowledge of x?
I'm sure it's different for any given a and x.
Adagio said:What you're describing here is a "given".
No. I wasn't describing anything. I was stating the closure principle, and saying it's false.
You don't seem to have followed this thread of the conversation at all. Here's how it's gone so far (with irrelevant steps taken out):
Me: Knowledge entails belief
You: No it doesn't. Some people have asserted that knowledge is closed under entailment. But there are good arguments for not accepting that knowledge is closed under entailment.
Me: The entailment principle (knowledge entails belief) is not the same as the closure principle (knowledge is closed under entailment). Those two principles don't have remotely the same meaning. The former is true, the latter is false. I don't know why you're bringing up the closure principle.
You: (quoting me describing the closure principle) What you're describing here is a "given."
Me: What? I have no idea where you're coming from at this point. I've never said anything about a given, or anything about the closure principle except that it's false. And you have yet to address the entailment principle--which is different from the closure principle.
Adagio said:Ash: I'm curious what account you would give of entailment that does not rely on particular or general identity.
Adagio: Give me an example of what your talking about.
You copied some text from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy into one of your posts (unattributed, I might add). Part of the text read "Since knowledge entails belief...". I take it you mean to assert the entailment principle, even though prior to that point (and later) you have argued that knowledge is not a kind of belief. I have asked you to explicate your account of entailment here, because I must assume it doesn't rely on identity. I assume that, because you've argued in that vein multiple times. If knowledge is not a kind of belief, why does it entail belief?
Adagio said:Then I'd say that your unfamiliar with science and how it works. If that were true, Einstein would never have questioned the physices from the past.
This doesn't seem to follow at all. Einstein could accept something, and still question it. So can I.
If you're saying that one can only accept what one cannot question, in my case, there are probably only a hundred or so propositions, the vast majority of them uninteresting, that I would accept.
Adagio said:All scientific theories are constantly challenged.
Really? I haven't read any challenges lately to phlogiston theory. Nor have I read any challenges lately to phrenology. Those are scientific theories.
Perhaps you had better say "All currently accepted scientific theories are constantly challenged." But this is also false, unless by "challenged" you mean to include skepticism that never leaves the mind of the person who's doing the challenging. When was the last time someone published a paper presenting some kind of challenge to the laws of thermodynamics? When was the last time someone published a paper presenting a challenge to the heliocentric theory of the solar system? When was the last time someone published a paper presenting a challenge to the theory of plate tectonics?
Adagio said:Religions are examples of closed systems. They reason from the Top-down. They begin with a premise and then look for things that justify the premise as verification.
Again, this seems pretty obviously false. I would agree that some religionists do this. But I doubt very seriously that most do.
Adagio said:I know that 2+2=4. It doesn't require belief or faith.
I've not said anything about faith in this discussion, so I don't know why you're bringing it up.
But anyway, if you know that 2+2=4, the fact that you know it entails that you believe it, at least so long as you are a rational person. You might treat a Moorean assertion as involving a modal operator with the usual scope problems. But in this case, it doesn't seem like this'll be much help. Here's why:
Let's designate '@' as the modal operator "believes."
You might argue that:
~@(2+2=4)
isn't equivalent as
@ ~(2+2=4)
Since the first entails that you could remain agnostic about whether 2+2=4 is true. But knowing that 2+2=4 makes it pretty difficult to say that one is agnostic about whether 2+2=4.
Adagio said:If somebody asks me to answer that problem, I don't say "I believe the answer is 4".
Well, so what? If someone asks me to answer it, I don't say that either. But I believe that 2+2=4.
Adagio said:Then if you can think of a few, and it's a small set...what are they? I asked you this: "If your own beliefs come into conflict with the truth...which do you accept? The truth, or do you hold to a belief demonstrated as false?" Are you telling me that you would hold to the belief in the face of contradicting evidence?
Yes. That is exactly what I'm saying. An example would be my belief that the tenets of National Socialism are morally wrong. Another example would by my belief that abusing children is wrong. Another example would be my belief that I love my daughter and my wife. I can think of others, but in no case would I revise those sorts of beliefs.
Adagio said:I listed them. Did you not read what I posted? What your speaking of is the Epistemic Closure Principle.
Yes, I've read your posts. In detail, multiple times. You did not argue against the entailment principle. You argued against the closure principle, a principle for which I have not argued (indeed, I didn't even introduce it into the thread). I think the closure principle is false. I think the entailment principle is true (in almost all cases, anyway). They're different principles.
Adagio said:The 3 major religions certainly are.
By 3 major religions, which do you mean? Do you mean the three major Abrahamic religions? Well...I suppose it doesn't matter, because those are not closed systems, at least in any sense by which I understand that term. Maybe you have some definition of it that makes sense.
All three of these religions have changed over time. All three have new additions and approaches in their theologies. All three have changed, and changing, political structures. All three have changed, and changing, concepts of their scriptures.
Maybe you mean something else by "closed system." If so, you'll have to explain what you mean.
Adagio said:I would regard buddhism more as a philosophy but I'm sure others would argue otherwise. Many types of Buddhism, for example, are effectively or explicitly a-theistic, either rejecting gods or simply not bothering with them in any fashion.
I don't know of a sect of Buddhism that literally rejects all gods. The attitude among some Theravedan and Hinayana sects seems to be that questions about God are not meaningful to the core problem facing human beings, and so it's not a question that is taken up. The Mahayana and Vajrayoga Buddhist traditions acknowledge the existence and importance of gods.
Adagio said:Although Buddhism is perhaps the best known atheistic religion, there are others, such as Jainism and some mystical forms of Hinduism.
It's questionable whether Jainism is actually atheistic. Like Siddhartha, Vardhamana thought that questions about the traditional Vedic gods, or involvement with them, isn't important. The Tirthankaras, however, are sometimes said to reside in the realm of the gods. Whether that's a metaphor or not, who knows?
Adagio said:I don't know of a religion that doesn't have some foundational structure or doctrine that serves as the authority or basis for itself. Can you give me an example of one?
I can't think of one either, but that's not what you said. What you said was that all religions are authoritarian. An authority need not be authoritarian. For example, the Dalai Lama is an authority in Vajrayana Buddhism. But he does not try to control the lives of his followers. Buddhist monks usually live under pretty strict rules, but they agree to them. They are free to leave at any time. I suppose the Pope is a bit more authoritarian, but even in Catholocism, there's a fair bit of tolerance for new points of view (I would grant that this has not always been the case).
Adagio said:What religion doesn't require belief in it's doctrine?
I can't think of a single one that does. Christianity would exist regardless of whether any given adherent believed in its doctrine or not. So would Judaism. so would Islam. So would Taoism. So would the Yezidis. Etc.
Adagio said:And what does brainwashing have to do with this? People can accept or reject religions for reasons that have nothing to do with "brainwashing".
You didn't say "accept." You said "require." I don't even know how that would work, but if it does, however that might be, the religion that requires belief is likely to be ready to back up the requirement with force.
Adagio said:First of all I reject the premise that this is associated with fiction.
You mean, you don't think the phrase has any connection to discussions of fiction? I know I said I don't usually use wikipedia as a source, but since this is a question of how ideas are associated in the public consciousness, wikipedia would be not merely a source, but evidence. Go to wikipedia and search the phrase "suspension of disbelief."
Adagio said:Belief in something doesn't mean that the subject is fiction.
I never said otherwise. Indeed, I've said just the opposite several times.
Adagio said:You may be attempting to "associate" it with fiction, but I reject that notion. It's purely subjective on your part. George W. Bush may tell us that Iraq has WMD, and we accept that uncritically. We suspend our disbelief when we do that.
It seems more correct to say that we suspend the normal functioning of our critical faculties. 'Suspension of disbelief' implies that there is a state of disbelief which is suspended. This is why it's associated with fiction. When we pick up a novel, we know the declarative sentences in the novel do not purport to make true claims of the actual world. Technically, novels are bunches of lies, strung together. But for reasons well beyond the scope of this thread, we suspend our default state of disbelief, and allow ourselves to relate to the characters and events described.
By contrast, when Bush (or whoever) says that there are WMDs in Iraq, the default state is not a belief that he's lying (well, OK, maybe in his case). The default state of a reasonable person is to suspend judgment, not disbelief, until hearing Bush's case. Critical faculties are then applied, and we decide whether the case is sufficient to justify belief in Bush's claim.